The Last Place You'd Look (7 page)

The detectives consulted with numerous agencies, including the FBI, and they polygraphed a number of individuals. Construction sites, ditches, and vacant fields were searched, and data on traffic stops in the surrounding areas were pulled and analyzed. They entered Laurie in every possible database and kept the district attorney’s office in the loop as they went along.

Investigators dug even deeper and asked the hard questions. Did Laurie have a secret life? If so, then they needed to know. They checked the status of old boyfriends and kept tabs on everyone involved in the case.

Although there were few victims’ services available in 1992, the officers kept in touch with Mary. They say that whenever a body was discovered, they would try and beat the media to let her know. The investigators say the media was “constantly working against us.”

But the media did keep her name in front of the community. And despite what Skorlinski terms “tons and tons and tons of newspaper articles,” Laurie’s disappearance continues to remain an enigma.

Krueger and Skorlinski continue to look for Laurie. Every once in a while some new lead pops up. Human remains are recovered. They try to inform Mary before she hears it on the news but admit that she often “beats us to the punch.”

These law enforcement officers share the polygraph results and evidence with Mary and try to keep her in the loop. And, they say, they have learned from the mistakes they have made in this case.

“The complaint was not treated as serious; they didn’t take a lot of photos,” says Skorlinski in retrospect. And what is most puzzling about the case is that there were lots of witnesses in the area, but no one saw anything.

“We turned over everything in that apartment complex, and it doesn’t make sense for this woman to disappear,” says Skorlinski.

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Ed Smart, father of Elizabeth Smart, who was kidnapped at the age of fourteen as she slept in her bedroom and later recovered alive, says, “Everyone deserves to have their child back.”

Donna Jean Glasgow reminds the world that families of missing adults also deserve to have their loved ones back. Her brother, John Glasgow, vanished at the age of forty-five. John was a hardworking, conscientious, straight-arrow kind of guy who would never fall off the face of the earth, according to his family. At the time he disappeared, he was in a good marriage, was established, and had plenty of money in the bank. When his car was discovered abandoned in another county, the Glasgow family found themselves dealing with two different law enforcement agencies. Donna says neither has made it easy for them.

“The laissez-faire attitude that the Little Rock Police Department has taken about the case has been very frustrating to the family. Since the car was found in Conway County, the sheriff there also shares jurisdiction over the case. We, the family, have taken charge in many ways because law enforcement just wasn’t interested in what they regarded [as] a simple missing persons case,” says Donna.

Donna and the rest of the members of the large and close Glasgow family believe John was murdered, but says, “Law enforcement never seemed to be very suspicious at all, and his case never rose above that of a missing person.”

When does a missing persons case take on urgency for an agency? Mistakes in past cases have resulted in new laws, as well as the overhaul and establishment of departmental rules and regulations that require an immediate response when a child disappears.

Child abduction response teams (CARTs) are also gaining ground. These teams provide multiagency responses in emergencies. Much like the task forces set up to handle disasters, CARTs work with centralized communications and coordinated search and rescue. They drill to keep themselves sharp and ready.

But when it comes to adults who are missing, the reaction often can be different from agency to agency. Parents of young adults who have gone missing have been instrumental in changing individual state laws in order to require an immediate report and investigation. Still, many believe their police are both apathetic and unsympathetic to their concerns.

Not all departments fall into that category. Some have special missing persons units. Many agencies, and in particular the ones that have attained accreditation, have general procedures for dealing with missing persons cases.

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Jacksonville, North Carolina, sits on the state’s coast. With three large military installations located within Onslow County, Jacksonville’s officers stay busy.

Michael Yaniero serves the city as chief of police. A transplant from Johnson City, Tennessee, Yaniero continued and refined the policies of his predecessors by establishing a formal protocol for missing persons cases.

Jacksonville’s policy is simple and to the point: When an adult goes missing, they take a report. Period. There’s no lapse in time, no officer who says, “Wait and see if he comes home,” no one to suggest that maybe the individual left of his or her own accord so he or she is not technically missing, even when that’s a possibility. They take a report and they do it at the moment the person is reported missing. The first paragraph of that general order states:

A missing person report will be completed for any person adult [
sic
], whose last known location was in the City of Jacksonville, or whose temporary or permanent residence is the City of Jacksonville, or when the person’s last location is unknown, or whose parent’s, spouse’s, guardian’s or legal custodian’s temporary or permanent residence is in the City of Jacksonville. When in doubt, the officer will take a report.

The general order also outlines who will conduct the initial investigation, what steps the officer must take—from obtaining a photograph to notifying his supervisor when the person is mentally or physically challenged, elderly, or despondent. It also delineates the dissemination of information throughout the department to other agencies and to databases, outlines the responsibility for searches, and covers moving the case along to an investigator, if indicated.

Yaniero’s general order also provides guidance for officers who come into contact with someone who might have been reported missing. All in all, it’s a comprehensive policy and, so far at least, it’s worked well for Jacksonville.

The chief says his department handles an average of between fifty and sixty missing persons cases a year. Of those, the majority are runaways—a statistic that is in line with the rest of the country. Most of missing persons cases, Yaniero says, are resolved within a few days.

The chief believes it’s important to have a written policy for dealing with missing persons: it helps the officer secure critical information and cuts down on the chance that something will be missed. But he also stresses that taking the initial report and following up are the right things to do.

“It doesn’t matter [if the person has only been gone for] two hours,” Yaniero says, adding that the old forty-eight hour rule would violate North Carolina’s present statutes regarding adding a missing person to the national database.

“If someone’s missing, that’s a void that’s in their life forever. If you’re talking about moral obligations, I think our obligation as police officers to police the community is to focus on improving the quality of life, not just to arrest, not just to serve,” he says.

Yaniero says simple compassion should guide officers. “People won’t care about you unless we care about them.”

One problem that holds back police investigations is when a missing persons case moves into another jurisdiction. Often the originating agency doesn’t have the resources to pursue a missing person in other areas—particularly when a case that originates in one state moves to another. Under those circumstances, agencies must rely on the police in the other jurisdiction to follow up for them.

Another major challenge is financial. In the movies, DNA is tested and the results come back within hours. In real life, the process is expensive and it takes months to get an answer.

As for more training, Yaniero says he’d take it if it was available, but in most cases, it’s not. “The resources just aren’t there,” he says.

In the meantime, his officers work under guidelines that dictate they take every missing persons case seriously. The best way to do that is for the officers to treat every family in a missing persons case the same way they’d want their own families treated.

“A lot of the time departments are judged by one person. While we do our best to select the best people for the [job], obviously we’re still dealing with humans, and sometimes humans make bad decisions,” Yaniero says.

Science is the search for truth—it is not a game in which one tries to beat his opponent, to do harm to others.—Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling

Yesterday

T
his is what is known about the child without a name: he was somewhere between four and six years old, a little guy who weighed about thirty pounds—as much as any healthy two and a half year old. Found on a frigid, fading February day in 1957 on the trash-strewn side of Susquehanna Road in the Fox Chase section of Philadelphia, the child’s body was stuffed in an old J. C. Penney bassinet box.

Bruised and malnourished, the little boy was naked, the nails on his fingers and toes clipped to the quick. His brownish blond hair was shaven to the scalp in places, gashed and uneven, as if the makeshift barber was in a hurry. Traces of the shorn hair still clung to his body. Investigators theorized that whoever cut it did so after the child’s death, possibly to help conceal his identity. Seven scars, some consistent with medical treatment, were found on the body. His eyes were blue.

Stuffed into the box with the boy was the remnant of an old plaid blanket. The unrelenting cold weather helped preserve the boy’s remains but made it tougher to pinpoint the hour—or day—he took his last breath. Estimates were that he died anywhere from two days to two weeks before his discovery.

Police photographed the child, who came to be known as the “Boy in the Box,” and blanketed the Philadelphia area with flyers and posters. They checked bassinet sales and accounted for all but one purchased in the area. They tracked the blanket and searched medical records in their quest to solve the riddle of the anonymous dead child.

Although detectives played out every lead, interviewing thousands in the decades since his body was found, the little boy remains without an identity. Many years after burial, authorities disinterred his body to extract material for DNA comparison, but decomposition made it impossible to obtain nuclear DNA. Instead, they settled for a sample of mitochondrial DNA, known as mtDNA.

And that microscopic bit of genetic material may one day be the key that unlocks this mystery.

Today

While the Boy in the Box waits patiently for a name, a second child—also abused, also abandoned—sleeps forever under another Philadelphia headstone.

Of African American descent, this child was believed to be about four years old. Wrapped in old bed sheets and a towel, then stuffed in a pastel green, pink, and blue nylon duffel bag, his nude, decomposed remains were tossed into a vacant lot under the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia.

The tiny boy’s face was so beaten and decayed it was nearly impossible to make out his features. His remains weighed forty-one pounds, and at thirty-eight inches, he would have stood slightly over three feet tall.

The boy’s body, abandoned in January 1994, remained under the bridge in his makeshift shroud until discovered by a passerby on May 27 of that year. By that time, snowstorms and the biting cold had yielded to spring thaws and waves of presummer heat.

An autopsy revealed the child was no stranger to frequent and vicious beatings. Old broken bones and healed wounds covered his body. The little boy’s head and face told the story of his terrible, final moments: he had been beaten and killed with a blunt object.

The medical examiner preserved bits of tissue and other biological material from the tiny corpse. And from those bits, DNA was extracted.

DNA that helped unlock the mystery of the “Boy in the Bag.”

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To understand how DNA works in matching missing persons to unidentified remains, it is necessary to first understand a little about the nature of DNA or, as it’s known by its full name, deoxyribonucleic acid. All DNA is not created equal. Normal human cells contain both the nuclear and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA); however, each individual cell holds only one copy of the nuclear DNA, compared with up to one thousand copies of mtDNA.

Nuclear DNA is both much more fragile than mtDNA and also more useful because both biological parents pass along identifiable genetic material to the child through nuclear DNA. Mitochondrial DNA is different. The father’s DNA is not present in a child’s mtDNA. Children receive mtDNA only through their mothers; thus this type of DNA links only maternal relatives. Nuclear DNA can establish paternity, but mtDNA cannot; however, both types can establish maternity.

Like a fingerprint, though, DNA is only useful if there is something with which to compare it. That’s a concept many misunderstand. Simply finding blood evidence or fingerprints at a scene isn’t enough to solve a case, although their presence enhances the chances of a case’s solvability. If a fingerprint is discovered at the scene of a crime, one must either have access to the person who made that fingerprint to compare those prints to the latent evidence, or one must have a fingerprint already on file in a searchable database, such as the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) maintained by the FBI.

As in fingerprint evidence, there also must be a record with which to compare DNA samples. In the case of a missing person, authorities often evaluate recovered DNA with that of a blood relative if a sample of the missing loved one’s DNA is not available. To identify the Boy in the Box, authorities would need a maternal relative or sibling who shares the same mother, since only mtDNA was recovered. The father would not work.

In the United States, the DNA profiles of convicted offenders are stored in a large computer database accessible to law enforcement agencies. The database, which also contains DNA profiles obtained from crime scenes, is called the Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, also maintained by the FBI. Thousands of matches, or “hits,” have resulted from CODIS, enabling police to solve many crimes. Conversely, CODIS also exonerates the innocent.

In addition to CODIS and IAFIS, the FBI has a missing persons DNA database. This database is used to compare submitted DNA profiles (such as DNA taken from a body) against the DNA of missing persons whose DNA profiles are already in the system.

Once only possible in the imaginative realms of movies and television, DNA works real-world magic. First isolated in 1869 by a Swiss physician, the genetic material didn’t receive much public attention until the 1950s, when its study launched the science of molecular biology. Back in the 1950s when the Boy in the Box was found, DNA was as mysterious as a black hole. But in 1993, just one year before the Boy in the Bag was found, DNA had become the impetus for novels and movie plots, like the late Michael Crichton’s
Jurassic Park
. Today, DNA pops up all over the small screen, both from Jerry Springer–type reality television shows to crime dramas, like
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
and
NCIS
.

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But investigators who work with the nameless dead know that reality and fiction rarely intersect. Death investigators know there is nothing noble, nice, or comforting about coming to a violent and lonely end. Since they can’t stop what has already taken place, they instead do their jobs.

They start by putting a name to the victim. Sometimes that’s easy: the victim is known, has identification, is recognizable, or matches a poster or an APB (all points bulletin). Other times, as in the case of the Boy in the Box, the body has been deliberately disguised, stripped of anything that identifies it, decomposed or skeletonized like the Boy in the Bag, is far, far from home, or has been dead for many years, leaving the trail cold and close to impossible to track.

Lou Eliopulos understands cases of unresolved identities. Throughout his more than thirty-year career, which has taken him from the Florida Medical Examiner’s Office to his present position as chief of the Forensic Consultant Unit of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), Eliopulos has dealt with hundreds—maybe thousands—of unidentified bodies. He remembers well those unmatched to names, buried in lonely graves in strange places far from the people who loved them.

Author of
The Death Investigator’s Handbook
, a well-regarded publication used by countless homicide investigators, Eliopulos says the longer a body goes unidentified, the greater the chances of the deceased being from another area—one reason it took so long to identify the Boy in the Bag, who, as it turned out, was not from Philadelphia.

“You can imagine the problems [we face] of people coming [to this country] as illegal immigrants and working on farms as seasonal labor,” Eliopulos says. Add to that mix the runaways, the homeless, the mentally ill, and drifters, and our highly mobile population presents a real challenge for law enforcement.

But sometimes investigators get lucky, a family member’s persistence pays off, or there’s simply a break in a case. Then the unknown body becomes someone’s missing sister or son or mother or husband.

And, in the case of the Boy in the Bag, he becomes a missing four-year-old named Jerell Willis.

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Prior to DNA turning into the gold standard for identification, investigators often relied on the science of forensic odontology, also known as forensic dentistry. This is not to imply forensic dentistry is outdated or no longer effective. Quite the contrary: forensic dentistry continues to be one of the most important tools for matching the missing to their identities. Until DNA matching became practical for criminal justice purposes, forensic dentistry was an investigator’s best chance of identifying unknown recovered remains. That’s because teeth, like fingerprints, are unique. No one shares the exact same pattern of dental work, wear, growth, decay, and distribution. Since the United States has a large and comprehensive system of dental records, they are often used to identify unknown bodies.

It isn’t really a modern science, though. Forensic dentistry has roots based in Roman legend. Proving that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, Nero’s murderous mother, Agrippina, reportedly ordered the slaying of another woman. When the head was brought to Agrippina as proof of her demise, the emperor’s mother didn’t at first recognize her, but by looking in the dead woman’s mouth, she found a bad tooth she knew belonged to the unlucky victim.

To identify bodies, forensic dentists have worked on mass disasters such as tsunamis, airplane crashes, fires, and acts of terrorism. Of course, the dead victims must have dental records on file somewhere in order to make comparisons. Like DNA, there must be something with which to compare the evidence for the evidence to have value. Most of the Indian Ocean tsunami victims in 2004 were identified through DNA extracted through the molars.

Historically, forensic dentists or odontologists have not only identified crime victims, but also villains: Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, were matched to their dental records following their 1945 deaths in a German bunker. Forensic dentists can also use teeth to determine the gender of a victim, and since teeth are one of the hardest and most indestructible substances in the human body, they are likely to survive trauma that destroys flesh and blood. And, as mentioned before, they are also a good source of DNA.

“The purpose of the teeth is to locate STR or nuclear DNA, usually in the molars if there [have] been no dental fillings, root canals, etcetera. If the collection method is done carefully there is a chance that STR can be found in the pulp of the tooth,” says Gerald Nance, a case manager with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and retired criminal investigator.

For small children, like the Boy in the Bag, forensic dentistry can provide clues about age and level of dental care. He had a chipped front tooth, but the damage could have come from the beating that killed him. The other Phila
delphia child, the Boy in the Box, was bucktoothed and had a full set of baby
teeth, but in the 1950s dental care for young children was not as common as it is today. Many never saw a dentist, and for kids raised in poverty, the odds were even greater that there were no dentists in their lives. Sadly, the same holds true today.

Still, for one unfortunate missing woman, frequent and extensive dental care eventually paid off in reuniting her—albeit postmortem—with her family. Eliopulos, who spent fifteen years working as an investigator for the Florida Medical Examiner’s office, says it took a quarter of a century before the girl he knew as “Angel” was reunited with her family.

The seventeen-year-old derived her nickname from an angel tattoo she wore. Struck and killed by a van on a major highway, Angel’s extensive dental work made her unique. Although investigators were able to track the girl to a waitressing job in a nearby state, Angel had worked under an alias and the lead grew cold. The medical examiner’s office considered her a runaway, but despite their efforts she remained a Jane Doe.

Six months after Eliopulos left the medical examiner’s office and began work with NCIS, the mystery was solved. Angel’s sister started looking for her again and, although investigators had checked all available databases in the United States at that time, she wasn’t on any of them. The reason? Angel was from Canada. A forensic odontologist matched the remains to her dental records.

Another case where dental records helped bring home a missing loved one involved a young sailor not seen alive in twenty-three years. In the military, when someone disappears, he is declared absent without leave, or AWOL. After thirty days, he is labeled a deserter. Because of this classification, many who fall victim to foul play are never considered missing persons in the legal sense—only absconders. It is a problem that often leads to a lack of information when identifying found bodies.

“They may very well escape any type of inquiry from medical examiners or coroners looking for a missing person who’s in the military,” says Eliopulos. “We need to change that.”

When his sister reinstituted a search for the missing sailor, investigators found an unidentified body that matched his basic description at the time of his disappearance.

“The body was long gone and buried,” Eliopulos says. But the medical examiner’s office had pulled the jaw and saved it, just in case. It was a match.